I am an evil giraffe. Who no longer blogs about politics.

…”Having spent the last four years poisoning the well, Barack Obama is now shocked to discover that he can’t drink from it.”

Moral of the story, kids: karma. It’s what’s for dinner. And sometimes – well, here’s the thing. If you know that a man has a personal sense of honor, or patriotism, or ethics, or whatever it is that keeps him from… taking thoughts to their logical conclusions… and you shamelessly take advantage of that to squeeze concession after concession and retreat after retreat out of him… sure, it works. And I suppose that there’s a certain sick joy in watching him be aware of the fact that you’re taking cynical and vicious advantage of his better nature.

What Kurtz should have said: “To quote, conservative blogger Moe Lane: ‘Barack Obama has only one notable skill as a Politician: getting himself elected.’ While admittedly if you are going to be a one trick pony, as a politician that’s a nice trick to have, the problem is you can’t get a damn thing done in governance. Your own side isn’t afraid of you because, heck you didn’t help them get elected and you lack the negotiation skills to find the compromise point where everyone wins to convince the other side to work with you.

I’ve asked myself that as well.
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Pretending one thinks that the well is sound, when has been poisoning it, is a way to divide and polarize the public between those who find it plausible and those who don’t.
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If he keeps us fighting over the things after he leaves office, perhaps he wins. If we give up, perhaps he wins.
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I dunno.

Not necessarily.
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Think about what a plan to never to do anything that would make a detractor love one nor anything that would make a supporter hate one would mean.
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It means significant optimism about one’s ability to control what events one has to react to, as well as in one’s ability to react and to spin the reaction.
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The latter may be very good, for certain values of good, but the former is of dubious certainty.
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The risk of something outside that happening before the term ends is too high to bet the farm on it.
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While it isn’t certain to happen over that time frame, it speaks to bad planning, and bad planning has a way of coming apart. Other scenarios regarding what Obama might be attempting to do also have evidence of bad long term planning.
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Now that he has won the second term, there are two ways public opinion might be relevant to Obama’s long term plans. One is the next congressional election, for which Obama has shown little in the way of true interest and effective involvement. The rest is the possibility he cares what reputation posterity gives him. The further into the future one looks, the less likely it is that he will be able to maintain the uncertainty that lets anyone project onto him whatever they want to. On the other hand, as less people care about him, there will also be less investigation.